Matthew Desmond Quotes
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We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.
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Fire itself is very beautiful, and there's an attachment to fire that firefighters have.
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I saw people get fired after their eviction. But when I found that if you get evicted, your chances of losing your job increase by 20 percent, that's when it really hit home for me.
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A lot of people didn't know just what eviction does to people, how it really sets their life on a different and much more difficult path, acting not like a condition of poverty but a cause of it.
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I think I've read all of W.E.B. Du Bois, which is a lot. He started off with comprehensive field work in Philadelphia, publishing a book in 1899 called 'The Philadelphia Negro'. It was this wonderful combination of clear statistical data and ethnographic data.
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When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
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I think there are ways that graduate students can fact-check their work. I think there are ways that we can do this that don't require massive amounts of resources.
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Eviction causes loss. You lose not only your home but also your possessions, which are thrown onto the curb or taken by movers, and often you can't keep up payments.
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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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Since the publication of 'Evicted', I have had countless conversations with concerned families across America. Teachers in under-served communities have told me about high classroom turnover rates, which hinder students' ability to reach their full potential.
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In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
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Kids increase people's risk of eviction.
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'Sag Harbor' brought me a new readership - it's a coming of age tale about growing up in the '80s.
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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I don't think that you can address poverty unless you address the lack of affordable housing in the cities.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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The standard of 'affordable' housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family's income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent.
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I think that we value fairness in this country. We value equal opportunity. Without a stable home, those ideals really fall apart.
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Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
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I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
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Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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There is a deep connection, when we're talking about certain market forces and a legal structure that inhibits low or moderate income families from getting ahead. Eviction is part of a business model at the bottom of the market.
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When I want to understand a problem, I want to understand it from the ground level.